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Monday, 15 December 2014

Mass Civil Breakdown

Pentagon preparing for Mass Civil Breakdown

Nafeez Ahmed

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational
tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is
funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for
large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US
military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop
immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior
officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and
to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis –
the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to
improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and
political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the
US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a
Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific
Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of
social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine
"the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying
their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian
revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy
crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to
identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become
mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of
Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political
movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate,"
along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project,
managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements
involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will
cover 58 countries in total.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to
determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates
peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are
different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed
militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study
non-violent activists:

"In every
context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural,
and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism,
and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they
were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism
studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This
project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political
violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive
interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who,
though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."

I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria
Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists
working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and
which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no
response.

Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a
series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical
causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security
threat of interest to the DoD.

Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US
Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different
parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US
Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale
political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why?
Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element
of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding
research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I
appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the
opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response.
Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The
Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United
States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security
challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US
military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase
the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and
insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their
causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic
future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in
collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The
three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could
happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide
over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research.
This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US
Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in
a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward
producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The
dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim
discourse" at Arizona State University.

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal
investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human
Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior
Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that
are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be
integrated with operations."

Although Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr Harold
Hawkins had assured the university researchers at the outset that the project
was merely "a basic research effort, so we shouldn't be concerned about
doing applied stuff", the meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to
"feed results" into "applications," Corman said in the
email. He advised his researchers to "think about shaping results,
reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly see their application for tools that
can be taken to the field."

Many independent scholars are critical of what they see as
the US government's efforts to militarise social science in the service of war.
In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US
government noting that the Pentagon lacks "the kind of infrastructure for
evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research" in a way
that involves "rigorous, balanced and objective peer review", calling
for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National
Science Foundation (NSF).

The following month, the DoD signed a memorandum of
understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate on the management of Minerva. In
response, the AAA cautioned that although research proposals would now be
evaluated by NSF's merit-review panels. "Pentagon officials will have
decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels":

"… there remain concerns within the
discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon's
agenda. Other critics of the programme, including the Network of Concerned
Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the programme would discourage
research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a
place for independent discussion and critique of the military."

According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at
St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology:
Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, "when you looked at
the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal
social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you
added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the
distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of
empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual
contributions from the larger project."

Prof Price has previously exposed how the Pentagon's Human
Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed to embed social scientists in
military field operations - routinely conducted training scenarios set in
regions "within the United States."

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS
directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios
"adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic
situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the
military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and
influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists
protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were
members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were
tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were
'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of
the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of
viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's
strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon
planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass
surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of
coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton
University in New York, concurs with Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social
scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the
"study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven
movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots
movements."

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and
self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of
DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple
fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global
system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no
qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and
academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And
How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT.
Follow him on Facebook and Twitter @nafeezahmed.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...